Americana

1. Is Trump the luckiest man alive?
2. The JD Vance story
3. Dems battle over ‘virtual vote’
4. RFK Jr. apologizes for leak
5. Menendez’s corruption conviction

Also: The latest on what voters think of Biden, and an unlikely voice at the RNC.

“It’s so weird to be at a convention 38 hours after an assassination attempt,” CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp told me on Monday, as he left the Republican National Convention. “For a lot of people, it was like a spiritual awakening.”

I heard that word, “weird,” many times as the RNC got underway in Milwaukee. It was unusual for so many things to be clicking at the same time; it was surprising that a protest outside the perimeter only pulled around 1000 people; it was amazing that a platform fight, in which anti-abortion activists got rolled on the language they wanted, was already forgotten by the time Trump delegates walked into the Fiserv Forum.

The “unity” that Republicans and commentators talked about on Saturday is already fading. Democrats stopped campaigning after the failed assassination attempt, but only for a day, and hit Trump especially hard over picking JD Vance as his running mate. On Monday morning, Vivek Ramaswamy was musing about whether the shooting could lead to the national post-irony togetherness that Americans felt after 9/11. By Tuesday morning, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker was gently chastising reporters near the convention for even asking about a Trump-Vance Republican rebrand as the party of civility: “Whatever they’re gonna say right now, they’re belying the facts of what they’ve done.”

The Book of MAGA

MILWAUKEE – “Prayer works!” said Lee Greenwood.

The country singer’s band started playing his hit, “God Bless the USA,” which inspired a Trump-endorsed printing of the Bible. Trump waited backstage, his right ear bandaged, for his first public appearance since a failed attempt on his life.

“Prayer works!” Greenwood repeated. “Because He was sure, as Donald Trump turned his head just slightly, that the bullet missed him, just enough, to save his life — to be the next president of the United States!”

Before Trump’s rally in Butler, his third Republican convention was shaping up as the most optimistic in decades. Not since 2004 had the party entered the summer with a lead in the polls; not since 1972 had the Democratic Party been loudly debating whether to change its ticket and salvage the race.

The Butler rally didn’t freeze the campaign in place. By Tuesday, Democrats were back to arguing about Joe Biden, and pushing back against the idea that national “unity” required softer rhetoric. (“Do you not say anything because it might incite somebody?” Biden asked NBC’s Lester Holt.)

But in the convention’s first days, Trump’s survival had changed how his party talked about him. He wasn’t just lucky. He was anointed. “I personally believe that God did intervene,” Vivek Ramaswamy told conservatives at a Heritage Foundation summit outside the convention. T-shirt sellers hawked gear with images of pastors laying hands on Trump in the Oval Office: “We Got Your Back.” Inside the Fiserv Forum, the first night’s GOP speakers praised the Lord for protecting their nominee.

“On Saturday, the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle,” South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott told the convention hall on Monday night. “But an American lion got back up on his feet and he roared!”

What JD Vance brings to the table

Republicans nominated Ohio Sen. JD Vance for vice president on Monday, putting a 39-year-old conservative populist on their ticket after Trump rejected applicants with more traditional GOP backgrounds.

Trump’s sons, Eric and Don Jr, had lobbied hard for Vance, who’d abandoned and recanted his 2016 criticism of Trump to the point that he was now a prominent defender of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “I bought into the media’s lies and distortions,” Vance told Fox News on Monday, as a crowd of GOP delegates waited outside the network’s convention studio for a glimpse of him. Nationalist conservatives had made the Vance case for years: He had become an “America First” candidate through their movement, a father of three worried about “America’s low fertility,” in favor of limiting immigration, and opposed to new aid for Ukraine.

Vance-skeptical Republicans fretted that the GOP ticket had picked a ticket with contempt for corporate America — though not enough to halt support from donors like Elon Musk and Marc Andreesen — and skepticism of supporting Ukraine. “I think what they’re hearing overseas is, the United States is pulling back,” said former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who was attending the convention, but had not endorsed Trump. Democrats latched onto Vance’s anti-abortion politics in his 2022 race, including support for a total ban that, Monday night, was deleted from his website.

“JD Vance is uniquely emblematic of exactly what voters hate about the MAGA turn of the GOP,” Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman Ben Wikler told Semafor. “He’s somebody who has no principles other than power, and is willing to stop at nothing to rip away women’s control over their own bodies.”

The DNC push to nominate Biden early

Democrats brawled over their nominating process on Tuesday, after a group of House Democrats protested a planned virtual roll call vote on July 22, weeks before the Chicago convention. Led by California Rep. Jared Huffman, who’d just launched the party’s Project 2025 messaging task force, they urged the DNC to abandon an early nominating plan it developed after Ohio’s Secretary of State warned that their convention would miss the state’s ballot deadline.

“There is no legal justification for this extraordinary and unprecedented action which would effectively accelerate the nomination process by nearly a month,” wrote the House Democrats, pointing out that Ohio had tweaked its deadline already, in a special legislative session, to ensure Biden would be on the ballot.

The response from the Biden campaign: Ohio Republicans could double-cross them. “We instituted this before they had a fix,” Biden-Harris deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks told reporters in Milwaukee on Tuesday. “And we’re going to continue on that path, because we’re not going to leave it up to them to change the rules again.”

Hours later, three former DNC chairs co-signed a letter asking for the “virtual process” to go ahead, to prevent any threat from “hyper-litigious” Republicans who might change the rules and challenge their ticket. A spokesman for Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine told Semafor that the idea of him going back on their new deadline was “patently absurd and ridiculous.”

RFK Jr. call with Trump leaks

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. apologized Tuesday for the release of a video that showed Donald Trump calling him on Sunday to discuss his skepticism of vaccines, urging the independent candidate to “do something” to help him. The 100-second clip was first posted by Robert F. Kennedy III, one of the candidate’s sons, who wrote on X that Trump had missed an opportunity: “He could have picked a unity ticket, instead he picked JD ‘fire all the unvaccinated nurses’ Vance.”

Kennedy barely spoke in the clip, holding up his cell phone as Trump discussed his qualms about combination vaccines (“looks like it’s meant for a horse”) and how it felt to be grazed by a bullet (“like the world’s largest mosquito”). Trump noted that he and Kennedy had talked about this before — Kennedy came to Trump Tower in 2016 to discuss a vaccine research committee that was never formed — and hinted at a next step. “I think it’ll be so good for you and so big for you,” he said. “And we’re going to win.”

Democrats, who have been working against Kennedy for months, said that the call revealed the candidate’s role as a catspaw for Trump; Kennedy confirmed that he and Trump met in person on Monday, but said he was not dropping out of the race. On Tuesday, his campaign prevailed at the North Carolina board of elections, which ruled that his We the People Party could appear on the November ballot. (It rejected the petitions of Cornel West, which were collected in part by Republican operatives.)

Menendez convicted for corruption

A New York jury convicted New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez on all 16 corruption counts against him on Tuesday, and fellow Democrats called for him to resign his seat. “If he refuses to vacate his office,” New Jersey Gov. Patrick Murphy said in a statement, “I call on the US Senate to vote to expel him.”

Menendez immediately planned to appeal, and refused to quit, maintaining that gifts he took from representatives of foreign governments did not constitute bribes. “I have never, ever been a foreign agent,” he told reporters in Manhattan, “and the decision rendered by the jury today would put at risk every member of the United States Senate, in terms of what they think a foreign agent would be.”

Democrats who’d withheld judgment before the verdict abandoned him as soon as it was read. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Menendez “must now do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, and our country, and resign” — Democrats in key 2024 races joined him. Menendez remains on the New Jersey ballot, after filing a last-minute independent bid and predicting that he’d be “exonerated.” Both major party nominees urged him to hang it up.

Ads

• Maggie Goodlander for Congress, “Let’s Be Real.” In the 48 hours after the Trump assassination attempt, many Republicans — including JD Vance — asked if Democrats were radicalizing people by accusing Trump of threatening democracy. Democrats haven’t stopped saying that. Goodlander, who’s running for an open, Democratic-leaning seat in New Hampshire, builds her entire 60-second ad around that: “Our democracy is under threat right now by an extreme movement in our politics.”
• Abe for Arizona, “Over Never Trumpers.” Trump endorsed Abe Hamedeh for Congress in December. Blake Masters has run as a Trump quasi-endorsee anyway, using imagery from his 2022 Senate campaign, which Hamedeh has tried to get off the air. Hamedeh’s response, in what has been a brutally nasty race, is to label both Hamedeh and House Speaker Ben Toma (a third candidate) Never Trumpers, without a citation.
• Dan Newhouse for Congress, “Deceived.” Newhouse is one of just two House Republicans who remain in office after voting to impeach Trump for his role in Jan. 6. Trump endorsed Tiffany Smiley, who ran unsuccessfully for US Senate in 2022, to beat him in the all-party primary. Newhouse’s response: Hitting Smiley over the PAC for “outsiders” that she set up after that campaign, and how most of its money went to pay off 2022 campaign debts. The argument is that she’s conning voters — but there is no mention of Trump.

Polls

No pollster has come back from the field yet with data on how voters are reacting to the Trump assassination attempt. The nominee was in good shape before that — largely because Biden was in such bad shape. Virginia voters still view Trump negatively, but support for Biden has tumbled. Just 46% of Black voters support him, nearly half what he got in 2020, when he carried the state by 10 points. We’re seeing a ton of separation between Biden and down-ballot Democrats, more like the gap between his approval rating and Democratic performance in 2022 than anything in a modern presidential election.

Democrats and Republicans agree that Saturday’s events in Pennsylvania froze the dump-Biden campaign. It didn’t freeze Biden’s poll numbers. Sixty-three percent of registered voters believe that Biden is either not involved in major White House decisions, or only “somewhat” involved. Seventy-one percent believe that the White House hasn’t been “transparent” about Biden’s issues. Despite that, Harris, who has defended Biden in public, has gotten slightly more popular, boosted by Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who are taking a second look at her. New York Times polling in swing states found a slightly different pattern — Harris unpopular, Biden less popular, but Biden holding onto more elderly voters than his vice president.

Scooped!

The best story Dave wishes he wrote this week:

Trump broke his own news on Monday, posting on Truth Social that he’d picked JD Vance as his running mate. Reporters chasing that story were ready with the backstory, and Politico’s Meredith McGraw had a particularly great one. None of Trump’s come-to-Jesus meetings with Vance missed the cut, nor Trump’s four-letter message to the Club for Growth when it spent against him, nor Vance’s luck on the golf course when Trump invited him to play. “Vance, to his relief, later told acquaintances it was his best ever round of golf.”

Next

• 14 days until primaries in Arizona
• 21 days until primaries in Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, and Washington
• 28 days until primaries in Connecticut, Minnesota, Vermont, and Wisconsin
• 34 days until the Democratic National Convention
• 112 days until the 2024 presidential election

Teamsters president Sean O’Brien infuriated Democrats and many labor organizers with his Monday night speech to the RNC — the longest of the night. He didn’t officially endorse Trump, but he called the ex-president a “tough S.O.B.” for how he handled Saturday’s failed assassination attempt. That led to some inspired ranting, the best of it from Hamilton Nolan, the author of a new book about labor’s modern comeback, and a leftist who wants Biden to abandon the 2024 campaign.

• JD Vance’s energy reversal is a risky gamble on Ohio’s future.
• Biden’s rent cap is a half-hearted populist gesture.
• Wall Street donors left with few palatable options after JD Vance pick.